Carbon's co-simulation approach allows for the hardware design to be run through any of the leading RTL simulators while the firmware is interactively debugged using software tools such as ARM's RealView debugger.

"This new co-simulation library delivers the benefits of virtual platforms to the RTL designer by leveraging the existing RTL infrastructure and avoiding the task of assembling a virtual platform," said Tom Rathje, Carbon's vice president of Engineering, in a statement.

Co-simulation of the models with RTL code is supported in all leading simulators, including Synopsys VCS, Cadence Incisive Enterprise Simulator and Modelsim from Mentor Graphics. ARM models currently available in the model library include the Cortex A9UP, Cortex A9MP, Cortex A8, Cortex M3, Cortex R4, 1176, 1136, 11MPCore and 926.

The Carbon Model Library for Co-Simulation is shipping now. Pricing starts at $25,000.